The Wanderer, Chapter 1

The land shook violently. No, Kya told himself, he imagined that the earth moved. It wouldn’t be the first time his mind had played tricks on him. What with the appearance of the lady who was encased in a block of ice, yet still managed to speak English fluently. It wasn’t just that, the lady had remained frozen for the two hours he had remained speaking to her in the blistering sun of the Sahara. Weird things happened frequently in Kya’s life but surely the lady had to be fictional. Her appearance certainly did not seem to be fictional nor look to be something Kya’s complex and ever ticking mind could come up with. To start with she was beautiful, like teenage boy’s fantasy rolled into one lady, who actually couldn’t of been a day or two older than 19. She wasn’t just beautiful; she was the reason that the word beautiful was ever created. She radiated sunlight, like the brightest star illuminates the southern hemisphere on a clear night. Her flowing blonde hair twinkled in the light, giving her a shine that the world’s most powerful leaders wish to have. Her eyes, an emerald green looked as if they had seen all the world had to offer and gave her a mental toughness, an aura of confidence that radiated within her. Kya was instantly attracted to the lady, within minutes was telling her his life story, how he had been left in a school for the gifted in the middle of the Sahara desert by his parents over two years ago. His parent’s had thought that Kya was special, gifted in some way, and that his mind was not catastrophic but intellectual. He had spent the last two years at the prestigious Sahara College which only accepted student’s who had special “talents”.
Despite it’s standing with the public, Sahara College was not a school that was focused on furthering its pupils knowledge, or increasing their intellectual ability. The creation of the school was based on a simple idea, which was first entertained fully by the founder James King; “If you took the smartest and most talented kids in the country and equipped them with the fitness, physical and mental toughness required for military service then you’d have the best army in the world”. And that was Sahara College’s aim, to give the most “talented” youth of Northern Africa the military training to turn them into secret weapons for their countries. Things did not quite turn out the way King and other investors of the school expected when Secret Services, Terrorist groups, contract killers and other mysterious groups discovered the truth about Sahara College and were willing to pay thousands of dollars to recruit the “new nuclear weapons of the world” into their respective agencies.
Most of the students Sahara College accepted were both mentally and physically tough but the most gifted students were the weaker, more fragile students who needed longer training than the stronger ones but would become a lot more useful to the agencies when they were fully trained. Kya Treffolk was one of the latter, physically tough and one of the stronger students in the college but nowhere near as mentally tough. Kya struggled to come to terms with his mind, often seeming to fight against what it was processing and he seemed to stop trusting his judgment in times of difficulty, which made him both ingenious and frustrating to the Sahara College trainers. Kya’s special “talent” was that he had an ability to fight off what his mind was saying to him. To Kya it was like his mind was telling him not to trust his mind’s judgment. Sahara College was baffled by his talent as every other authority, doctor or brain surgeon but quickly came to the decision that the boy must be extremely gifted, another weapon for their underage army and another payment in a never ending cash flow. Mr. and Mrs. Treffolk, Kya’s parents, had received a letter from Sahara College telling them that Kya would be receiving all the higher level learning that a mind of his capacity required with the school’s technologically advanced equipment. Swayed Kya’s parents could not refuse and had enlisted him in the College within a week.
Using the school’s technologically advanced equipment the Sahara College’s staff had worked out Kya’s strengths and weaknesses, the exact workings of his talent and how to nurture it correctly. Kya’s training involved toughing it out for days on end in the middle of the Sahara Desert, tasked with finding his own possessions that staff had taken out of his room and placed up to a hundred kilometres away. The purpose of these tasks was to allow Kya to master fully controlling his mind.